Cookies?
Library Header Image
LSE Research Online LSE Library Services

'Condoms cause AIDS’: poison, prevention and denial in South Africa

McNeill, Fraser G. (2009) 'Condoms cause AIDS’: poison, prevention and denial in South Africa. African Affairs, 108 (432). pp. 353-370. ISSN 0001-9909

Full text not available from this repository.

Identification Number: 10.1093/afraf/adp020

Abstract

This article presents a critique of the position that South Africans are engaged in a process of collective HIV/AIDS denial. Ex-President Mbeki's well-documented belief that HIV does not lead to AIDS, and that South Africans are not dying of AIDS-related disease, has been used by academics and journalists to explain the widespread public silence around the pandemic. The article argues that the complex social processes employed to create and maintain the avoidance of open conversation around HIV/AIDS are rooted, not in Mbeki's denialism, but rather in conventions through which causes of death can, and cannot, be spoken about. Through case studies of poisonings and public performances by HIV/AIDS educators, the article demonstrates that by invoking public silence and coded language, ‘degrees of separation’ are constructed that create social distance between individuals and the unnatural cause of another's death. Far from a collective denial, acts of public silence and obfuscation should be read as protestations of innocence: attempts to drive a wedge between open, public knowledge of death and potential implication in the increasing number of AIDS-related fatalities. HIV/AIDS prevention policies based on inadequate understandings of this wider context have given rise to the social construction of peer educators – and condoms as their central symbol of prevention – as vectors of the virus.

Item Type: Article
Official URL: http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org
Additional Information: © 2009 The Author
Divisions: Anthropology
Subjects: R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
D History General and Old World > DT Africa
Date Deposited: 06 Feb 2009 10:56
Last Modified: 04 Mar 2024 03:48
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/22574

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item